Lessons from Grandma About the Holocaust

Last night, two children, Max and Sarah, vacationing at their grandparents’ home in Boca Raton, Florida, traveled far, far away from there. They landed in Piwniczna, a town small enough to be summed up in a single sentence on Wikipedia:

“Piwniczna-Zdrój [pivˈnit​͡ʂna ˈzdrui̯] (until 1999 Piwniczna) is a town in Nowy Sacz County, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland, near the border with Slovakia, with 5,744 inhabitants (2004).”

There is nothing in this entry about Max and Sarah’s great-grandmother, Hene Federgrun, or about her parents and her grandparents, or about her ten younger siblings, all of whom once shared a house in this one-sentence town. There is nothing about the family butcher store, or about Max and Sarah’s would-be aunts and uncles, then mere children, lugging water from the well to wash their small bodies.

The word shtetl does not appear in this Wikipedian glimpse into their great-grandmother’s town, a town that had just 14 Jewish families. It is a word that makes Max and Sarah giggle, such a silly word to pronounce: shtetl, shtetl, shtetl, over and over again.

My 72-year-old mother has been guiding Max and Sarah, page by page, on this journey to Poland. She has been reading aloud to them from the book that my father plucked away on typewriter paper, 25 years ago. It is a book dedicated to me, to my sister, Amy, and to my brother, Andrew, “so you can pass these remembrances on.” It is quite dusty.

Tonight, I listen to my mom’s hoarse voice describe my grandmother’s decision to leave behind her bustling family, to “convert” from Hene to Anna, to head to America. She came with a bunch of withouts—without a trade, a language, a fortune, a home—but with the determination to carve out a decent life for herself and then, of course, send for her family. Tonight, my children learn of Anna’s father’s imprisonment. And they learn of the word pogrom. They do not think this one is quite as funny to say.

Mom’s reading mesmerizes Max and Sarah. They ask question upon question. But, perhaps it is time to travel back home now, to suggest that my mom close the book for another year or two, that the kids go swimming or watch SpongeBob. They are my babies, after all. And though they are 10 and 8, not babies at all, maybe that is still too young. For if my mother keeps flipping pages, there will be descriptions of Anna’s parents and of her ten siblings. This one went to the gas chamber. This one, to a firing squad. And this one? We never knew how. They will see photographs with captions that say, “Brother-Name Unknown.” Name. Unknown.

They will see toothless babies, my grandmother’s nieces and nephews and cousins, babies who would be my parents’ age now, nameless babies, who died simply because they were Jewish in Piwniczna. They will learn that there were hundreds of relatives, all gone. They will learn the details of why Anna’s plan did not work.

I still remember being 20 years old, living in Florence for the semester, and standing in a hallway, listening to other college students make travel plans to visit this relative in Germany or that one in Holland. I sobbed. I suddenly felt lost and alone and deeply homesick.  Though my father had always told us the importance of the Holocaust, I never really understood. He talked about relatives and gas chambers.  He talked about people who stood by and did nothing. It was so vague and far away and surreal. But there, standing in that hallway in Florence, I suddenly and unexpectedly grieved for Grandma’s siblings, Henry and Rebecca and Samuel and Rachael. And I even grieved for those without names, for all the relatives that I could have called, that I could have visited. If only.

And today, although I am a teacher (or perhaps because I am a teacher), I fear that in Max and Sarah’s school the Holocaust will be reduced to yet another lesson in yet another unit in yet another class—that it will be just another piece in the massive curriculum glob. I worry that, in an effort to cover so much, students are emerging from our classrooms with a dangerous level of simplicity about all kinds of topics: in this case, a Jews-died-sucks-for-them version of events. But I also know that far too many parents have relinquished their own duty to teach their children, relying solely on the educational system.

I am not sure what Max and Sarah should learn right now. Is pulling out this book a good idea? I don’t know. I am just one mother trying to raise two kids. I will answer their questions, and I will try to be truthful and sensitive. I will rely on my instincts.  But there is nothing simple about any of this.

I do believe that, even as young kids, they should know who they are. They should know about their great-grandmother’s forgotten town and about the human beings who inhabited it. They should know that Piwniczna and Grandma and they are all far more important than a one-sentence summary in Wikipedia might suggest.

I will ask my mom to keep reading to them. At least, I think I will.